ANG SNUOL, CAMBODIA — The Globe and Mail
Published
Thursday, May. 30 2013,
At precisely 4 p.m. on a Saturday, the blue metal gate of the Ying
Dong Shoes factory slid open and a mass of pink-, yellow- and
green-shirted workers emerged into the litter-strewn alley outside.
Nearly all were teenage girls.
Approached outside, even the
youngest-looking girls claimed to be 18 years old. But several also say
that it’s an open secret that Ying Dong employs underage staff on its
manufacturing lines.
While employing girls as young as 15 isn’t necessarily a violation of
Cambodia’s weak labour laws, their employment is supposed to be capped
at a maximum of eight hours a day. The girls making leather boots and
shoes inside the Ying Dong plant say they all work 13 hours a day during
the week, plus another eight hours on Saturdays, in a country where the
minimum wage is $80 a month.
Despite two decades of consumer
campaigns against retail giants such as Nike and The Gap over issues
like child labour and poor working conditions in their factories, the
same problems keep popping up elsewhere. One government clamps down, and
the garment factories simply move to other countries where the minimum
wage is lower and the laws – or the enforcement of them – more lax. It
could be in the cheap-labour frontier of Bangladesh, where a building
collapsed and killed 1,127, some of whom were producing shirts for
Loblaw’s popular Joe Fresh label. Or it could be here in Cambodia.
Last
month’s deadly collapse of Rana Plaza, however, has upended the
relationship between consumer, retailer and factory. Major retailers
such as H&M, Benetton and Joe Fresh responded with pledges to
improve working conditions in garment factories.
Age is another
major concern. One of the main brands that produces footwear at Ying
Dong, Asics Ltd. of Japan, acknowledges it had received a warning last
year from the International Labour Organization that said the factory
was employing at least three workers younger than the legal minimum age
of 15. Several of the girls working at Ying Dong told The Globe and Mail
they had falsified their identification documents, with the factory
owner’s tacit approval, in order to take jobs there.
The factory is owned by New Star Group, a Taiwanese firm that owns two other controversial factories in Cambodia.
At
Ying Dong, it takes only a glance to realize how young some of the work
force is. “There are a lot of young workers here – many are younger
than her,” said 21-year-old Danet, pointing at a particularly diminutive
colleague wearing a pink Ying Dong Shoes shirt. The younger girl
quickly hid behind other colleagues. “Lots of the girls are 14, 15, 16,
17,” Danet said.
Danet and her colleague were among several dozen
employees packed into the back of a mud-caked Hyundai cargo truck,
clinging to a rusted metal chain that would be the only seat belt for
their two-hour commute.
Another Ying Dong employee, who said she
was 18 but looked much younger, estimated that about half of Ying Dong’s
3,000 workers – nearly all of whom are female – were underage, although
The Globe and Mail was unable to confirm how many girls were under 15,
or whether those between 15 and 18 had their parents’ consent.
“The
girls want the jobs, so they make fake identification documents. The
company doesn’t care because they need the workers,” said the employee,
who gave her name as Jurriy.
The Globe and Mail has decided not to
publish the full names of the workers it interviewed in order for them
to avoid any possible punishment for speaking out.
The company
that owns the factory, which refused an interview request from The Globe
and Mail, has claimed in the past that all its workers are at least 18.
Cambodian labour law allows factories to employ workers as young as 15 –
provided they have their parents’ consent. Minors are also supposed to
get a minimum of 13 hours off between shifts and are barred from working
in hazardous conditions.
Jurriy described conditions inside the
Ying Dong plant as difficult, with staff expected to work 13-hour days –
7 a.m. to 9 p.m. with an hour lunch break – every weekday, and 7 a.m.
to 4 p.m. on Saturdays. Sundays are their only day off. “It’s very hot
inside. There’s no air conditioning. We have to make 200 to 300 shoes a
day [per work team] or else the owner gets angry.”
Asics spokesman
Katsumi Funakoshi said in an e-mail that a May, 2012, audit conducted
by the ILO Better Factories Cambodia program had found three workers at
the Ying Dong facility who had falsified their ID documents and were
“under the legal labour age limit.” The spokesman said the company is
not aware of any further cases of underage labour at the factory.
A
Quebec footwear company, Chaussures Régence, said in an e-mail to The
Globe and Mail that it once sourced footwear at Ying Dong Shoes in 2012
but ended the relationship.
“We had been doing [business] with
Ying Dong Shoes last year but we decided to stop because of delays,
quality issues [in] the first production we asked them to do. And since
we have our new factory, we can make things the way we want,” wrote
Jean-Damien Cangelosi, quality manager of Regence Footwear Cambodia.
Mr.
Cangelosi said the company was committed to being a force for good in
Cambodia. “Even if costs are lower here compared to Canada, we can do
things better for society in Cambodia by providing people better
conditions. It is one of my goals as quality manager here.”
New
Star Group, the Taiwanese owners of Ying Dong Shoes, was in the news
recently when another of its factories outside Phnom Penh partially
collapsed, killing two workers and injuring 11. The dead workers – who
were producing sneakers for Asics – were originally said to be 22 years
old, but relatives have since told local media that one of the dead
workers was actually a 15-year-old girl.
Three days after the
fatal accident, three young women were rushed to hospital during their
first day back on the job after fainting during their shifts. Such
faintings – caused by a mixture of heat and chemicals – are commonplace
in Cambodia’s garment and footwear factories.
A report published
last month by Better Factories Cambodia, a monitoring group established
by the International Labour Organization, hints that the problem of
underage workers in Cambodian footwear factories may be widespread.
“Five factories [out of nine that were visited] were found to not use
reliable documents to verify applicants’ age prior to hiring,” the
report reads. “In one factory, the hiring of workers under the age of 15
was confirmed.”
Though Better Factories Cambodia doesn’t identify
factories by name in its reports, it does send its findings to the
factory managers and owners as well as to foreign brands that are
members of the Better Factories project and source from a factory where
problems have been discovered.
Jill Tucker, program manager at
Better Factories Cambodia, said Chaussures Régence is not a member of
the voluntary program and therefore would not have received any warning
about Ying Dong, such as the one received by Asics.
Another
Cambodian factory owned by New Star Group made headlines in 2011 after
human-rights groups accused it of exporting shoes made inside
Sihanoukville Prison. A customer of that factory is Shoemax Ltd. of
Toronto, which sells the Taxi line of women’s shoes to small,
independent retailers. Shipping records show Shoemax has continued to
buy from New Star even after the prison labour scandal.
Shoemax
owner Sam Edelstein said he visits the factory every year and has seen
no child labour there. “It’s an open factory completely,” he said,
adding the workers go across the street for lunch.
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